ZyzzlCon 3009, part 2

[dougo]

Okay, by "tomorrow" I meant "some day soon"... Here's part 2 of my recap of the 2009 MIT Mystery Hunt, Escape From Zyzzlvaria.

I arrived at Central Services headquarters on Friday evening. After chowing down on some of the remains from the Mary Chung's order, I kibitzed a little bit on Good Will, Mystery Hunting, identifying a few movies based on oddly modified lines of dialogue from Good Will Hunting. There was a pretty big group working on this puzzle, though, and they seemed to have a good idea of how it worked and were chugging along, so I quickly volunteered when luckylefty was looking for people to do The Amazing Juggling Troupe Of Duckkon Undrum V. I had never participated in a Duck Konundrum before, so I wanted to give it a shot. Five of us sat on the floor of the seminar room and puzzled through the absurdly complicated instructions to re-enact a series of juggling routines performed by five 5-armed jugglers. In retrospect we should have had a sixth person recording the state at various intervals, because many times we would hit an inconsistency and have to start a routine over again because we couldn't remember enough history to rewind. After about 4 hours (which I'm told is much longer than Duck Konundra usually take) we successfully triggered the Apocalypse and read out the final answer.

When we returned to the main HQ room around 2am, the crowd had thinned out a bit (many had had to leave at midnight to catch the T), but there were still 12-15 people. By that point we had gained access to all the puzzles from phase 1, and had solved the Planet Pluto meta. I took a look at the work that had been done on Cheat Codes; someone had transcribed all the videos, along with the series of videogame controller button presses, into a Google Spreadsheet. I had an idea that maybe the button presses formed a cryptogram; whoever had transcribed the text had commented that "I know you've been waiting all 7 games to finally kill this guy after what he did to your parents." sounded like Harry Potter, and I saw that the corresponding cheat code could spell LORD VOLDEMORT. With help from hanechak, we filled out the rest of the villain names pretty quickly, and then used the resulting cryptogram key to spell out INDIVIDUAL LABOR LAW. After searching for a while to figure out if there was some term that meant this, we decided to just call it in, and it turned out to be the final answer, not a clue phrase. It's frustrating when this distinction isn't obvious; we don't want to waste the answer-checkers' time by calling in every non-obvious clue phrase, but we also don't want to waste our own time trying to get an answer out of something that's already the answer.

After that, I spent a while fruitlessly staring at a few puzzles that we were stuck on. For one of them, Hyperextensions, we had a very strong indication that the answer (or final clue phrase) involved the letters PSUIWNQGPPA, but none of the orderings we tried made sense of them. We knew the answer had ten letters, and the puzzle involved having single extra letters, so we tried removing each letter and anagramming the rest. The only thing that seemed to sort-of work was removing the Q to get SWAPPING UP, which we called in but were told was wrong; I thought about calling in UPSWAPPING, but thankfully my intuition was right that that couldn't be the answer. We never did solve this puzzle; it turned out that you had to sort the clue phrases by number of words, which in retrospect seems like a perfectly reasonable way to do it. Clearly we need to make a database of all the likely methods of sorting things and add "number of words in each phrase" to it. (The clue phrase, by the way, was APP USING QWP, with the answer being QUATTRO PRO—the puzzle had involved three-letter file extensions.)

Eventually I had a wacky idea for the Hiigara meta. Earlier I had semi-consciously noticed that the answer AL FRANKEN contained ALF; after staring at the answer HARBOR SONG, which seemed like a really odd phrase (it's the title of a Suzanne Vega song, and not much else), I noticed it contained ORSON, and I vaguely remembered that that was the name of Mork from Ork's boss back on Ork. This seemed like a really tenuous connection, but then I noticed that LAVENDER contained ENDER, and what clinched it was that INDIVIDUAL LABOR LAW contained DUALLA, a character from Battlestar Galactica. We took a wild guess that THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE was cluing HE-MAN, and some Google searching on substrings of CHINESE LANTERN turned up SELA, a Romulan from Star Trek: The Next Generation. hanechak had earlier figured out that Hiigara was from a PC game called Homeworld (which I knew of because Yes did the title song for the game!), so he had the idea to write down all these characters' homeworlds: Melmac, Ork, Earth, Sagittaron, Eternia, and Romulus. Looking at the first letters MOESER and knowing that we were missing one answer and looking for something that could be an alien currency, I came up with METEORS. This whole chain of ideas still seemed really shaky to me—we had been down more promising-seeming paths in future Hunts that had turned out to be totally wrong—but we called it in and it turned out to be right! It felt pretty satisfying to have contributed that much to solving a meta, but it was weird how unconvinced I was of the answer up until the moment it was confirmed. (On the way back from turning in our meteor—a clementine wrapped in tin foil—I wondered what the T planet was; I thought of Tatooine, and was very tempted to call in PUNJAB BAKERY for our missing answer. It turns out that Tatooine was right, but the answer was SOBER UP, for BERU.)

About ten minutes later, Kevin had a breakthrough on the Kronos meta. We had known for a long time that the answers for this round were all Star Trek episode titles (from various series), but ordering them in various ways (e.g. airdate) turned up nothing. His idea was to order them by stardate, and then use the decimal digit from the stardate to index into the name; this spelled RDHRTS, and we were missing three answers, so he yelled out REDSHIRTS! We quickly confirmed it, and soon afterward delivered a vaguely shirt-shaped object cut out of red construction paper.

So at this point, we only had two unsolved metas, and three unsolved puzzles in those rounds. One was Hyperextensions. Another was Dual Singularities, a variant Siamese twins crossword, that had been filled in long ago by Dean and Hugh, both of whom by now had gone home. Ping spent hours and hours trying to rearrange the answers in a way that unambiguously indicated a set of squares that could spell something, to no avail. (Someone eventually figured out how it worked on Saturday afternoon.) The third puzzle we were stuck on was Invasion of the Micronauts, and no one had any real idea where to start. We had found the tiny grid of words: PASSING, BIKINI, LUCKY, HUNT, BIG, DO. There also appeared to be a 26 by 6 grid delineated by invisible exclamation points. It turns out those were just there for spacing or something and had nothing to do with the puzzle. And the words are supposed to be cluing types of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, strange, charm. Which I guess makes sense since quarks are also tiny, but really, if you had "PASSING _______" on the Match Game, would "STRANGE" be in the top three? Even if you knew the answer was supposed to be seven letters, would you guess that?

Anyway, we were stuck until 9:42am Saturday with just these three puzzles and two metas. If we had known what to do with the "The ATM" meta, we probably wouldn't have needed Invasion of the Micronauts, but we were nowhere near getting atmospheric layers from THE RAM, STRAIT, MEDS, and REX. And having only three of five of the answers for Castor & Pollux was not enough even if we knew what to do.

I was fading fast at this point, so I went along to the Spaceship Exhibition and then back to the hotel. Here are some pictures and video:

Provide Remote Assistance from Doug Orleans on Vimeo.

Central Services tries to get their spaceship push a button on the side of a box. I think we later managed to push the button on the top of the box.

Navigate an Asteroid Field from Doug Orleans on Vimeo.

Beginner's Luck steers their spaceship through the asteroid field.

Activate Laser Beams from Doug Orleans on Vimeo.

Teams try to get their spaceships to hit a target with a laser beam. I couldn't tell if they succeeded or not.


This is getting long so I'll stop here for the night. Tune in for part 3, uh, some day soon!

Comments

[devjoe.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for the video of my ship scoring 5 points by plowing through 2 asteroids. Backwards. Controller interference was a huge problem and it seemed to drive better backwards (and later on, not at all).